Astronomers in the US have inferred the existence of an unknown ‘planetary mass object’ affecting the movements of space rocks in a distant asteroid belt
It seems the Solar System may be a little more crowded than we thought: a planet around the size of Mars could be hidden among its outer fringes.
A team from the University of Arizona has discovered a mysterious mass, dubbed Planet Ten, that appears to be tugging at the orbits of a population of space rocks known as the Kuiper Belt in the icy outskirts of the Solar System.
The Kuiper Belt lies beyond the orbit of Neptune and extends to a few hundred Astronomical Units (AU), with one AU representing the distance between Earth and the Sun.
This story is from the October 2017 edition of BBC Knowledge.
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This story is from the October 2017 edition of BBC Knowledge.
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